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Harness the Power of the Web for Programmable Applications: O'Reilly Releases RESTful Web Services

Sebastopol, CA--"A lot of people, even people who traditionally weren't
interested in web service, are becoming interested in RESTful ways of
doing things," reports Leonard Richardson, coauthor with Sam Ruby of the
new book, RESTful Web Services (O'Reilly, US $39.99). "The latest
version of Ruby on Rails was completely remodeled around RESTful
principles. JSR 311 is bringing RESTful principles to Java's server side.
Every time you turn around there's a new startup that offers a cool
RESTful web service."

For those who want to join the RESTful fray but aren't sure how to do it,
RESTful Web Services presents the principles of connecting to the
programmable web with technologies you already use every day. The key is
REST, the architectural style that drives the web. And while there's a
great deal of talk about REST, Richardson notes that there's a huge gap in
documentation for REST as applied to web services: "The end result of the
gap is poorly designed web services, and I wanted to try to put a stop to
that."

As Richardson explains, "The Fielding thesis defines REST as an
architectural style--a way of judging architectures. The definition of
REST never mentions web services, and it barely mentions HTTP. It's very
abstract. But a real web service uses HTTP, and it has to have a specific
architecture. That's where the gap is. You can poke around on the web and
find lots of disconnected best practices, but I think those practices
really ought to be organized into a concrete architecture (or a few
competing architectures) that follows the REST architectural style.

"Right now, everyone's making up ad hoc architectures according to their
own understanding of REST. Or, they're giving up on REST, dismissing it as
immature or sloppy, and going with RPC-style architectures instead,"
Richardson continues. "I wrote this book to move the starting point
forward. You don't have to start from the REST architectural style
anymore. You can start from our Resource-Oriented Architecture, and
architecture specifically geared towards web services, and based on how
well-designed services have worked in the past."

RESTful Web Services is the first book that applies the REST design
philosophy to real web services. The book:

Emphasizes the power of basic web technologies--the HTTP application
protocol, the URI naming standard, and the XML markup language

Introduces the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), a commonsense set of
rules for designing web services

Reveals how a RESTful design is simpler, more versatile, and more
scalable than a design based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs)

Discusses web service clients for popular programming languages

Demonstrates how to implement RESTful services in three popular
frameworks--Ruby on Rails, Restlet (for Java), and Django (for Python)

Focuses on practical issues, such as how to design and implement RESTful
web services and clients

"Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book."
--David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Rails framework

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